“No.”
“This afternoon?”
“Four o’clock.”
COOP SAT BACK in the glider and Wanda, in a rusted old lawn chair, wrapped her coat tighter around her. The glider was Coop’s favorite possession. It was an extravagance, having cost $150 at Greenhurst Nursery, but since Coop often entertained on his porch those visitors who were hesitant to go into the house where Uncle Frank sat drinking in front of the TV, the glider saw plenty of use. Soon, Coop would haul it down to the cellar so it wouldn’t rust over the winter—that was always a sad November day—but tonight was brisk but not cold, and the air was scented with burning corn husks. Coop glided back and forth, his foot resting on a stool, the wicker of which was punched through like a circus net that had seen an accident.
“Things are getting better,” Wanda said at last. “I have a plan. I just need to get through this rough patch. And I’ve got to go to Portland.”
“Why Portland?” Coop asked.
“Well . . .” said Wanda, then she released a little sigh, and gave up. She always forgot how much she feared Coop and craved his approval until she was face-to-face with him. Coop rubbed his great, yellow palms together and stared up into the trees. His shoulders were sloped at the angle those of a mountain would be, washed away by rain. “I’m registering with this agency,” Wanda continued. “It’s a way to make money. Honest money. I’m not with Hank anymore. I can’t go back to him ever again, Coop. He’s mean, Coop—meaner than I’ve told you.”
Coop shook his head. “What kind of agency?”
“Let me explain before you say anything, okay? And don’t make fun.”
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
“Wanda—”
“It’s an agency that matches couples with surrogate mothers. I want to be a surrogate mother.” Wanda cringed.
Coop smiled a smile of pain, silently.
“I want to carry a child, Coop. I’m never gonna have one of my own, I can just tell. I’m thirty-one and I’ve never even come close to meeting Mr. Right. I missed my chance; they’re all gone. I don’t know, Coop, they never liked me anyways, the good ones. But I want to carry a child. I don’t want to die with that regret, that I never did that with my body. I feel like my body wants it. There’s so many of these poor, infertile couples . . .” She paused, ashamed of showing emotion, and worried that it seemed, to Coop, disingenuous. “And I’d get paid ten thousand dollars.”
“Wanda, they give you a physical before they let you do that. They check you out good. Can you pass a physical?”
“Yes, Coop, I’m clean. Totally clean for months, I swear it.”
This was true, in a way. It had been months since she had done illegal drugs. Even pot. She still bought the pain pills from Tammy, but she swallowed them like she should. The last time she had snorted one was that day when she had gone to court in Boise. The day Gary came over.
Something went wrong in Wanda that day. She woke the next morning with a discomfort in her belly and a yawning sadness in her heart. I’m pregnant, she thought. This is what that feels like.
A cautious certainty took hold even though her period had been out of whack for years. She would go four months without menstruating, then they’d come all in a rush in one miserable, cramped month. She attributed this to not eating right. A friend told her if she ate raw spinach her periods would become regular. In any case, Wanda had been boyish in adolescence—her breasts, when they finally came, were small and cone-shaped—and she had suspected since then that her apparatus down there wasn’t functional.
As the days went on, she became more and more certain. Should she drink lighter fluid? Another friend had once been pregnant, and the fluid from one plastic disposable lighter had caused her to abort. Wanda went so far as to smash a lighter with a rolling pin and allow its contents to trickle into a coffee mug before the smell made her reconsider. Instead she swallowed a pain pill, thereby putting an end to her thinking for that day.
After two weeks of mild morning sickness and worry, mainly concerning how bad an abortion would hurt, Wanda decided it was time she confirmed what she already knew. She bought a pregnancy test, the kind where you pee on a stick. After a few minutes it gave a faint pink minus sign. Negative. She bought a different brand the next day and tried again. It too told her she wasn’t pregnant.
How could this be? She felt the little thing growing inside her. She had even come to suspect already that it was a girl. Was it still too early to show? She read and reread the insert from the pregnancy test. The next day, still wondering whom to believe—the tests or the baby inside her—proof came: she lowered her underwear to see a crease of rust on the white fabric. Either the baby had never been there to begin with, or it was coming out with her period. Wanda knew she should feel relieved, but she felt more miserable than ever before. Or, rather, her fundamental misery, which had been set off by her father’s death and deepened by her mother’s, and that Wanda had daubed for a few days with the idea of a baby, was laid bare again, and it was hotter and throbbed more for the treatment.
Why? She knew she couldn’t care for a child.
Then she saw a Donahue on “The Real Face of Surrogacy.” In reaction to the Baby M controversy, which was all over the news, several surrogate mothers took Donahue’s stage and insisted that nearly every surrogate pregnancy ended with a smooth transfer of the baby to the “intended parents,” or IPs. The surrogates were treated with the utmost respect by the IPs. The couples flew them in for visits, made sure they ate right, bought them gifts. Some let them play roles in the children’s lives, like aunts. Several couples came on and described their plights—the years of trying and failing, the tens of thousands of dollars spent on treatments that didn’t work, the decorated nurseries that remained empty until they found their surrogate mother. It touched that part of Wanda that had felt so guilty for playing the role of Mrs. Wojciechowski—that good woman, that rightful mother—and she stayed on the couch long after the show was over, blowing her nose into a dish towel, crying deliriously for those poor people who had been saved from suffering, and for herself, who, it seemed, never would be.
“I even quit smokin’,” Wanda offered.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
Wanda blushed with pride. “It was easy. Easier than I thought.”
“Still, Wanda, you might be gettin’ yourself in more than you can bargain for. It’s a real live baby you’ll have in your belly. That’s nothin’ to sneeze at.”
“I thought it through, Coop. I haven’t been thinkin’ about anything else.”
Coop squinted out at the street for a while, his eyes moving from side to side as if he were reading an answer written there on the pavement. Wanda was tempted to say more to convince him, but she quieted herself and let him think.
This was not the first time Wanda had hit Coop up for a loan, not by a long shot, but there was something different this time. It was evident to Coop that she was clean and had been, if not for months as she claimed, at least for weeks. Her complexion was clear and her face was full. And if Hank was truly gone for good, all the better. The man had always scared Coop, even though he was as scrawny as a wet poodle and flinched when Coop went to clap him on the back. There was something in the lines that framed Wanda’s eyes—age or weariness—that allowed Coop to look into them and not look away. Strange, that wrinkles would be attractive on a person. Well, when he was used to seeing those wild, hungry eyes and skin tortured with hives . . .
Fundamentally, the idea of carrying a baby for ten thousand dollars seemed crazy to Coop, but he had seen the same Donahue, so he knew that surrogate mothers got mandatory checkups before they became pregnant and after. He had noticed Wanda use the same phrase one of the surrogate mothers on the show had used: “My body wants this.” He didn’t fault Wanda, though, if she borrowed feelings from people on TV on her way to becoming real. Ten thousand dollars to go through a kind of enforced detox? Wanda could do worse.
&nb
sp; “I tell you what,” said Coop. “You take a couple weeks to think about this. If you’re still sure, then come back, and we’ll talk about the money.”
Wanda inhaled to protest, then thought better of it. Once Coop made a decision, he never changed his mind. This was a lesson Wanda could never learn when she was high. She’d whimper, wail, lie, make empty promises, and finally call him a traitor, but Coop would never budge. Neither would he ever show his anger. From a distance, he’d let her hiss and sputter like a campfire you mustn’t leave burning, then he’d walk wordlessly back into his house. What an idiot she had been!
Coop leaned forward in the glider to rest his elbows on his knees. “Good night for food shoppin’. Care to join me?”
They went to the grocery store, where Coop gave Wanda her own cart and told her to get whatever she wanted. She tried to keep it cheap: packages of assorted lunch meats, popcorn in disposable tins, milk, eggs. Coop filled his own cart and stopped in the beer aisle for several cases of the cheap stuff. Coop and Wanda were quiet as he loaded these onto the rack under his cart. Neither Coop nor Wanda drank; these were for Uncle Frank.
Then Coop dropped Wanda off at home. Unloading her groceries, she discovered that Coop had slipped her a packet of T-bones and—Wanda caught her breath—a bag of frozen chicken livers. Their mother had made the most delicious chicken-liver gravy. It had been Wanda’s favorite but, of course, she hadn’t the faintest idea how to make it.
FROM THE BACK porch of the house in which Coop and Wanda were raised, one could see band after band of decreasing width and fading color—the thick, mossy ribbon of an alfalfa field, a lighter one speckled with cows—leading to the ragged strand of a tree-lined canal. Beyond that the bands became threads, then the sky.
On an evening when he was only six or seven, Coop had been sitting there imagining he could hear the earth turning (it was really just the wash of soft sounds—distant running water, the wind’s hiss on grass, and the whir of the windmill) when a crash shook the house. Coop sprang to his feet and ran inside. Again: Chop! In the kitchen there were two chalky scars in the yellow wall, and his father stood grinning and weighing a long-handled axe in both hands. “Get the boys; we’re gonna make a door.” Maybe the beauty of the evening had inspired him to make the porch accessible from the kitchen. Whatever the reason, he was ecstatic. Coop, delighted as he always became when his father was in such a mood, got Paul and the two began to carry chunks of drywall to the back porch, leaving a trail of white dust through the living room.
Then their grandfather arrived, their mother’s father, who was a preacher. Their mother had called him. He put his hand on Coop’s father’s shoulder between chops, causing him to turn, his face bright, then confused, then desperate—quickly it darkened, just like that. Coop wondered if he had done something wrong by helping his father. Coop’s grandfather took the man out across the fields, where they talked and prayed.
The wall stayed open like that, the drywall torn away, ribs exposed, for months, as Coop’s father sank into silence and slept most of every day. Finally a stranger, someone from his grandfather’s church, came and repaired the wall. His mother painted it a yellow that didn’t quite match.
Wanda didn’t remember their father; she had been too young when he died. She remembered Alan, though, their stepfather from when she was five until she was eight. Under Alan’s tutelage their mother became a true drunk. It was like a daylong theater piece the couple performed, a passion play, which began quietly, Alan making whimpering requests of the children—“Bring me my coffee,” “Give Daddy a hug”—which would be grumpily reinforced by their mother from her easy chair in front of the TV. Then, in the afternoon, they would abandon their chipped coffee cups for Mason jars of iced tea and whiskey. “Look at Katherine, she’s gettin’ her boobies,” Alan said, and everyone laughed, except for Katherine, who folded her arms and ran outside. As the afternoon wore on and their mother and Alan howled at each other’s half-fictional stories and danced to country music, the children felt they had two big, sloppy playmates. But, like monkeys among elephants, the children were always sure to have an escape route open, because their mother and Alan weren’t like other parents—they didn’t look where they stepped. When the sun went down, it was best to go upstairs or to a friend’s house, because that’s when the drama’s climax took place. The two would go to the bedroom, forgetting to close the door, and rustle around, emitting mysterious bursts of laughter, grunts, and moans. Or, more often, there was a hollering, figurine-throwing fight.
Usually Coop, who had become a tall, heavy-set teenager, kept his distance from these silly, maudlin games in which neither his mother nor Alan could successfully complete an insulting sentence, but those times Alan grabbed their mother by the hair and slammed his open hand into her face as she thrashed and screamed, Coop intervened. He dragged Alan at arm’s length outside as the man swung and spat and cursed until he exhausted himself and crumpled, whimperingly. Once, though, Alan threw a good punch that landed squarely on Coop’s jaw, jarring him to the base of his spine. (Coop’s jaw was crooked for days, and he could barely chew until the swelling receded.) Coop responded with a powerful slug to Alan’s middle, which sent him staggering backward, releasing a spew of yellow, whiskey-scented vomit that splattered across Coop’s boots. Alan stood with his hands on his knees, shaking his head like a sick cat, until he was able to manage one huge gasp. “Sum-bitch,” he croaked, then there was a long pause as his windpipe seized again. He squeezed his eyes shut and managed another gasp. “Kill-you-sum-bitch.”
Coop’s mother rushed out and threw her arms around Alan, sheltering him. “Are you trying to kill him?” she screamed.
Coop held his aching jaw and laughed. What could he do but laugh?
Alan caught his breath, hid his face in his wife’s breast, and cried. He really was a coward.
“Go on!” Coop’s mother screamed.
Coop turned and wandered off down the dirt road. It was not until hours later, as he stood at the spigot on the back of the shed cleaning the yellow crust off his boots, that he cried a little.
Coop moved in with his uncle, his dead father’s brother, in town—another drunk, but of a different, quieter type. For the season that Coop lived there, none of his siblings spoke to him, partly because they felt abandoned, but mostly because they all, even the younger ones, hated their uncle because he had killed their father, albeit accidentally, on a hunting trip.
It was a few more months before Alan left for good. None of the children knew what unforgivable thing came to pass, but at the end of a fight, which was more hushed and urgent than usual, the children heard their mother say, “Leave, Alan.”
“I ain’t leavin’. This is my house much as yours now. I been payin’ the mortgage. And these kids is much mine as yours too.”
“Leave, Alan, please!” Her voice cracked with a fearfulness unfamiliar to the children.
“Why don’t you just go, if you need to be rid of me?”
The children heard the rustle and bump of their mother gathering some things. Could she actually be leaving? Wanda slipped out of bed and ran across the room to crawl into Katherine’s bed. The two held each other and cried.
“You’re a fuckin’ whore,” said Alan. It sounded as if he was sitting at the kitchen table, probably sipping straight whiskey, as their mother went up and down the stairs in a frightened rush. Then she left. Wanda could hardly believe it, but the old station wagon revved and sped down the driveway, leaving the children all hiding in their beds. There were minutes of quiet, without even a sound from the kitchen, until Alan announced loudly, “Your mother is a fuckin’ whore. You kids know what that is? Somebody fucks men for money.” Then he crossed the kitchen and opened the freezer for ice.
Wanda cried softly, and Katherine said, “Go to sleep. It’ll be all right.” But there was no confidence in her voice, only a scared tremor.
Then Alan’s footsteps were on the stairs, climbing up. He opened the door to t
heir room, and Wanda and Katherine clung to each other, shaking—their bodies actually shaking—with fear. “Look at me,” said Alan, “or else I’ll give you both a spanking.”
Neither of them moved.
“Look at me,” he said and pulled the covers from over their heads.
Katherine let out a little shriek.
“Your mother is a fuckin’ whore,” said Alan. “You know what that means? Means she sucks men’s pricks for a dollar.” Wanda saw that his pants were open and he held himself with his hand. “Look. This is gonna be yer livelihood.” Sickened and fascinated, Wanda caught a glimpse of a little white nub peeking out from a black mass before she turned to hide. She had seen the neighbors’ horses mating once, so that was what she thought men’s penises were: black poles like the nightsticks that dangled from policemen’s belts. But this was nothing so powerful; it looked, especially in the haze of memory, like a tiny, ugly face.
(The thought would return to her years later, when her foster brothers crept to her bedroom and forced themselves on her. What was it that tormented men and boys in the middle of the night? Why couldn’t they just sleep? She imagined herself mouthing those ugly little faces, sucking their Pinocchio-noses. This didn’t make it any better, just different.)
Paul, who, at thirteen, was the second-oldest brother, appeared brandishing a baseball bat in the doorway, flanked by the two other boys. “Get out of here!” he hollered at Alan. “Leave them alone or we’ll kill you!” The boys’ eyes were white in the dimness, and Louis, the youngest boy, only a year older than Wanda, was holding high some little weapon from the kitchen with a bravery his tear-streaked face belied. This was the part of the memory Wanda might rush over, to avoid the pang in her heart. Louis, that sweet and haunted boy, would spend his life in and out of Blackfoot. The last time he checked himself out they found his body days later on the shore of the Snake River a few miles and a rapids downstream from the psychiatric hospital.
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